Diceless Gaming: Running Amber

Originally published April 9, 2014

I've been thinking a great deal about dice mechanics recently and I've noticed my point of view is a bit different from other people's. For me handling dice rolling is matter of controlling probabilities, maximizing tension, and always asking myself what point does this roll serve. But I've noticed for others, and this is primarily in the context of whether just the players or the GM as well should be rolling, there is a matter of trust. Next week I'll talk about this more in detail but first I want to establish my own background and why I think that dice have nothing to do with trust.

The key to my thinking is the Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game. I've discuss this game before in a different context but today I want to talk about my general experiences with dice roleplaying the system itself. As name the suggests, Amber does away with dice completely, not even including such "hidden dice" as a deck of cards. As such, determining the success of any action depends on the decisions (or whims) of the game master.

This is a game that requires a lot of overt trust from the players. Everyone needs to trust that the game master won't abuse his or her power.

But to my mind, this isn't really any different from any other game. We've all heard the phrase "Rocks fall, everyone dies" (warning: TV Tropes link). The game master already has the option of raising difficulties to arbitrary levels of hardness or ease. So a lack of dice has nothing to with whether the game is "fair". A game master as creator the world and designer of the opposition can rig the game without breaking any official rules (only the rule of fun). The dice are merely a convenient scapegoat, something the players or the game masters use to deflect responsibility. Dice are the true form of game master screen.

Having run Amber quite successfully, I can definitely say dice are not needed for a good roleplaying game. They can serve useful roles, something I intend to discuss later, but they don't make things more fair just perhaps more arbitrary and chaotic.

As for the game itself, Amber uses the basic setting of Roger Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber and related works. The players take on the role of the children of the Princes and Princesses of Amber, gifted with superhuman strength and stamina, immortality, and the ability to traverse the infinity of worlds between Amber and Chaos (a realm of shapeshifting demons, characters can be from there instead). They can find any world they desire, wield mighty artifacts, and even destroy worlds.

In terms of stats, characters are ranked in four attributes: Psyche, Endurance, Strength, and Warfare. Even baseline level exceeds that of any normal human who was ever born. The characters are legendary generals, swordsmen, mentalists, perhaps even sorcerers. Without dice the person with the higher applicable attribute will generally win. Roleplaying considerations can come into it though. Sometimes you can wear down a stronger opponent, sometimes you can shift a conflict to one where you have the advantage, and sometimes you can cheat (like fighting a guy after your men shot him full of arrows). What is interesting about the ranking system is that the player characters will generally not know where they stand relative to the other characters, both PCs and NPCs.

Attributes are initially set by a bidding system where each player bids for first place in an attribute using their pool of character points. Where your final bid is, even if you lost, determines your rank in the attribute. So if you had the final third place bid then your rank is #3. However after the bidding and especially during advancement, a player character can raise their rank, possibly overtaking someone who started with a higher attribute. So that character who started in rank 3 can overtake the rank 2 person, even possibly the leader in that attribute. This adds to the sense of the unknown, especially since the game has an element of player conflict t. You never know if you are certain to win or not.

Personally I like that aspect of the game, though clearly it is not for everyone. For myself, not knowing how far I can push myself relative to an opponent or even what the limits are of my powers adds to the excitement.

What I really loved about the game was how fast it ran. Once you strip out the dice mechanics you make room for so much more story. Plots flow as fast as you can describe scenarios and you players react to them. Description and action take the place of task resolution. Plus the simplicity of characters (four stats plus some powers) minimizes preparation time. The fact that you have characters who own entire worlds makes collaborative world building an integral part of the setting.

There were some hiccups in play. Maintaining trust is crucial for a game like this and for some players not having a clear sense of what they could do, what their character's limits were or how they rated relative to the NPCs eroded that trust. I also found determining combat initiative to be very hard to adjudicate at the time. Having since run Apocalypse World with its fiction first philosophy, I think that it would be less of an issue for me now but it certainly was a problem in the larger melees at the time.

Amber is a bit out of print these days (I picked up my copy almost 15 years ago) but I've heard that Lords of Gossamer & Shadow uses the same system. I haven't had a chance to read it yet but if you are interested in diceless roleplaying, it might be a place to look.